Trading-Mentality

After my tilting AUDUSD trade (discussed in my October posts), I spent November getting back on track to my proper trading routine. It's working so far and this post is really just a recap of one of my best trades recently.

In my last post, I talked about tilting and taking an oversized position on AUDUSD. This is a small follow-up to that post.

It's been a while since I've been on tilt like I was yesterday, but I think the losing streak from September to October got to me quite a bit. Granted, I did experiment with a trailing system in September, but there's still an impact when I quantify it.

I've been having several parallel trains of thought recently. After I go through a trading recap of August and September, I'll touch on the Best Loser Wins book again and how it ties into a fairly recent Chat With Traders interview.

I recently finished this book on Audible and it's been giving me mixed thoughts, even as I'm writing this post. The full title of this book is "Best Loser Wins: Why Normal Thinking Never Wins the Trading Game – written by a high-stake day trader."

A big change in my trading consists of using the average true range (ATR) to set take profit targets. This is based on the assumption that ATR, a measure of volatility, will show the likely movement potential. In other words, a take profit of 1,000 pips will unlikely be hit in the near future if the 10-day ATR is only 30 pips.

Since my last $50K Combine attempt, I haven't thought much of Topstep nor have I made additional posts on them. More recently, I decided to take another shot at trading futures with them, especially since both ES and NQ are in pullbacks.

March was a brutal month, P&L wise. This was primarily due to mixed sentiment around interest rate cuts in the sense that the overall market was having trouble taking a directional bias. This trickled down to the signals that I look for, which resulted in a lot of false breakouts.